Welcome to the forum mate, It's usually not really a problem at all with bandwidth anymore but we all decided to leave the rule in place as a lot of people spent shiploads of time trying to source these manuals. It's not really that hard mate, put up an introduction about yourself and just go and welcome another 23 members and job done... 5-10 minutes.....Not hard really???
I'm also quite aware of the manuals attracting the audience as I do online marketing for a living. We are up 140,000 visitors a month and a lot of those people are after the manuals so if you do the math then bandwidth can be an issue if left open for every lazy bugger that can't be bothered contributing anything back to the forum.
EBay has them for sale if thats too much trouble mate.